I came across a good vlog today about improving the quality of the videos you upload to YouTube from Cory Williams (aka “Mr. Safety” - SMP Films).

The video that explains the process is pretty clear itself, especially by YouTube standards, and so I guess you can say the proof is in the pudding.

The process he outlines uses Sony Vegas Editing Software, but you could probably get other editing programs to do the trick as well.

At the end of the video he gives a rundown of the points to hit. I’ll reprint them here for convenience.

- 1mbps (speed)
- 320 x 240 (image size)
- 128 kbps audio (higher quality MP3)
- sharpest possibel setting
- 10% more brightness
- 20% more contrast (which keeps the gray from pixelating color)

There are a few YouTube updates some may be interested in - a contextual help icon (and corresponding information, of course) and a character counter that lets you know how many characters you have left when writing a comment.

Check them out in the video above.

Vlogging has arrived. Of course vlogging has arrived. But it struck me again how much it has arrived when I saw the video ad above from AOL News.

It occured to me that our popular culture reference points for this time in history will be vlogs as much as anything else. Surely they won’t be the types of things that reference other eras — American Bandstand outtakes, Saturday Night Live skits, or clips from MTV’s The Real World.

User-generated video. That’s our time. It is officially the Vlog Era.

Live video, or live vlogs, will be coming to YouTube in 2008. Straight from the horse’s mouth, in the video above, you can see Steve Chen of YouTube say that they are moving in that direction.

While there are already a number of places where you can vlog live, when YouTube jumps into the pool, you can be assured that the millions upon millions of vloggers they bring with them will change the live vlogging landscape.

Will we look back at 2008 as the year live vlogs went big? No doubt there’s a good chance.

See NewTeeVee for the original post of this video.

You can read more at the Hollywood Reporter.

You can check out the show itself at the Quarterlife website.

Upon taking offense to content they deemed insulting to Islam, the Pakistani government ordered PCCW, the main ISP in the country, to block the whole site. PCCW went about this task by by hijacking a YouTube web server address.

Because they were able to hijack the server address and didn’t simply block the site, other countries were affected as well.

Upon discovering the source of the problem, YouTube was able to convince PCCW to cease the hijack.

Adsense is the popular advertising platform that allows web publishers to easily monetize their content.

There is one large catch to all of this, however. You have to be a big-time player in order to run these ads - at least for now.

In Google’s words:

AdSense for video is now available to publishers who, at a minimum, serve one million video streams each month and are based in the U.S. with English language sites. In the near future, we do plan to expand the program to more publishers of various sizes and locations.

The ads for video will take two forms - InVideo ads and text overlay ads.

InVideo Ads

With InVideo ads, a transparent bar pops up on the bottom of the video with a link. When you click the link, a video ad begins playing in the same player as the original video. InVideo ads are based on the cost per thousand impressions model (CPM). See below:

Text Overlay Ads

With text overlay ads, a tranparent bar also pops up from the bottom of the video; however, when you click on the link in an overlay ad, it will take you direclty to the advertiser’s website. Overlay text ads are based on the cost per click model (CPC). See below:

You can see examples of both types of ads in action at Google.

You can read more about the program here.

There are some interesting numbers about the increasing numbers of “how to” searches and “how to” videos in a recent article at TVWeek.

According to the article, which references the internet marketing research firm Hitwise, 2.6% of searches in the U.S. are related to the “how-to” genre.

Video is cropping up in search results more and more. As well, a video how-to would seem to be the perfect answer for many how-to queries. The result, naturally, is more traffic being driven to video results.

The TV Week article states:

Of the top 10 how-to search queries, about 5% of Internet traffic from those queries goes to video sites, almost exclusively to YouTube, Mr. Tancer said. “There is definitely a market,” he said. “There is a desire to find information on the Internet, and the video portion is nascent.”

According to Hitwise (via TVWeek), the top “how-to” searches for the four-week period ending 1/26/08 were the following:

1. How to tie a tie
2. How to …
3. How to have sex
4. How to get pregnant
5. How to write a resume
6. How to win the lottery
7. How to kiss
8. How to lose weight fast
9. How to lose weight
10. How to solve a Rubik’s Cube

The how to / instructional video market is now taking off like gang busters. We are seeing more players in the space every day.

Some of the more popular video how-to sites are the following:

YouTube’s How-To Section … of course. It is also labeled “Style” for some reason and seems to be filled with with porn, semi-porn, Filipino soap operas, and political tripe. Maybe one day, when YouTube realizes the value of instructional information, they will seperate out the how-to from the … um, style.

ExpertVillage

VideoJug

Some Newer Players Gaining Ground:

Howcast

MonkeySee

WonderHowTo

Other related links:

The TV Week article

Hitwise

At the very top of the post is a How-To Vlog about, well, how to vlog from YouTuber Blade376

DailyMotion has recently opened up their high-def capabilities to a wider audience.

At least that’s what it seems like.

Not having followed exactly what they were offering before and to whom, it’s a little difficult to figure out exactly what’s news.

Here’s what they say:

For more than a year-and-a-half we have offered High-Quality video encoding, but with the rise of HD digital video cameras we have seen more and more Creative Content submitted in High Definition. This is why, from today on out, all HD video uploaded by MotionMakers will be automatically re-encoded in 720p High Definition for playback on the site.

I guess I can’t decifer this because I don’t really know what a “MotionMaker” is. Is it anyone uploading video onto DailyMotion, or is it some special group with special privileges?

In any case, the time-lapsed video above is an HD video of the Paris skyline from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m.

I am assuming that the embedded video here will play in high definition as it does on the DailyMotion site.

LINKS:

The DailyMotion High Def Video Channel

The Chinese government, with the ever-important PR behemoth known as the Olympics on the horizon, went into overdrive recently in order to do something about negative videos coming out of the country’s exploding online video market.

While Chinese video-sharing sites generally censor themselves, unflattering videos do still make it through from time to time.

So the good news here is that some private ownership is still possible. The bad news is that a crackdown is still on the way. More good news, however, is that industry analysts believe that the government is reluctant to bring too heavy a boot down onto the vibrant video sector.

Gauging from China’s history in controlling the country’s online activity, I would not be so bullish on the idea of a lenient hand — not until the Olympics have come and gone, in any case.

According to the China Post, the country’s most popular video sharing sites claim as many as 100 million visitors a day, “a scale that rivals China’s state TV channels.”

As for revenus, also according to the Post, we have the following numbers:

The government-sanctioned Internet Society of China is forecasting total revenues this year of 160 million yuan (US$22 million; €15 million) this year - nearly double the 2007 level. It says revenues will increase to 290 million yuan (US$40 million; €27 million) in 2009.

The eight top companies in the field have taken in US$190 million from private investors since 2005, according to BDA China Ltd., a consulting firm.

LINKS:

Some of the more popular Chinese video-sharing site:

Tudou

56.com

Youku

Some articles on the topic:

From the Wall Street Journal

From the China Post